


Lost & Found (The Whole World Will Hear Me)

by cjr09



Category: Those Who Went Missing
Genre: ARPG, Esks, Mentions of Death, Origin Prompt, Origin Prompt- The Transformation, TWWM, ThoseWhoWentMissing, also i can do dumb stuff in the tags like im doing right now, and drowning, and pele is very sad she cries, not a happy one kids, pls let me use it i beg its so much easier to read on here, this is a test to show how writing appears on different platforms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-14 08:53:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13586613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cjr09/pseuds/cjr09
Summary: A jackal is lost in the floodwaters of the rainy season. Then, she is found.She's not happy about it.





	Lost & Found (The Whole World Will Hear Me)

There is a terrible weight on her shoulders, pressing on her spine and crushing her rib cage; it is cold, it is sludge, it is in her ears and her eyes and her nose and her lungs, crushing her heart like a vice, like jaws without teeth.

They close and close and close and close and she cannot _breathe_ and she cannot _think_ and she cannot-

And she cannot remember.

She wakes on a riverbank, half sunk into the mud, tangled in roots and grass and soaked to the bone, but the terrible weight is gone as though it never were.

All of it is gone. She pulls herself from the mud and the grass comes with, but she can scarcely remember a time when it would not. Her paws do not leave marks in the mud beneath her, which strikes her as odd, but only fleetingly. Her tail is longer, she thinks, than it once was, but does not think it was ever anything else. She can hear, but she has no ears, and there is no mouth where she once might have felt jaws, teeth and tongue and taste. This is odd- she definitely remembers eating, drinking, biting, at some point. Didn’t she?

That terrible weight is gone from her shoulders, her lungs and spine and heart.

But it has taken with it all of the weight that once was hers.

She staggers from the mud, from the water and the bank and through the roots and the grass- she does not look back, she does not look down, because there is weight beneath her feet and she does not know it now but she may have known it once. The weight is gone from her body but the cold has not. She can feel fear’s jaws wound tight around the empty space where her heart may have once weighed her down.

She doesn’t know what else to do, so she moves forward. She isn’t breathing, not really, because she doesn’t need to, has no way of taking in the air anyway, but her sides heave with the remembered motion anyway. She can feel the roots of the plants between her shoulders moving with the motion, the roots that twist into her soul until she can’t tell where they end and herself begins because they are one and the same.

As they always have been, and if this isn’t truth, as she half-believes it to be, it will be in time.

There is one thing she knows.

She is an Esk. She is eternal, she is immortal, but she is not unchangeable- she will shift and change with her lands, she will grow and shrink as the sands of the desert encroach and she invades the forests. She is _traveler_ and she is defender of these lands; she was once lost and she is not found but she was found by someone.

She is- she is bitter. Fear’s jaws have her heart and something like sadness, like loss and despair crowd in her throat, salt and water spill from her eyes. She didn’t even know that was possible; she is Esk, she is ended.

She is dead.

Dead, but alive again? She stares hard at a paw- she flickers, wavers like the dance of flames, like ripples in water.

No, not alive. But not dead. Something in between; something like the space in between the breaths she can no longer take, the wavering heat between the sun on the sand, between the spark and the fire, the rain and the flood.

She stands on the edge between _lost_ and _found_ , rooted to the spot like the grass rooted in her shoulders, in her heart and soul. She is _traveler_ but she cannot step foot on either side of this boundary.

She is-

She does not know.

What is her name? What _was_ her name?

She trips- she is solid enough to do that now, apparently, and when she hits the ground the sand clings to her fur, stings her eyes, mixes with salt and sadness. The weight in her chest is too much; the icy teeth of fear squeeze it out of her.

She screams.

It’s a muffled, angry thing, and it takes her a moment to realize that she’s not really making noise- it rattles out of her chest, where her heart and lungs once were, but she has no mouth or tongue or teeth with which to speak.

The sound rattles in her mind, echoes through the spaces where blood and bone and life once were and rocks what’s left to the core.

She doesn’t need to breathe, and she doesn’t stop to think, so she can just… scream, and yell, and while there’s some release in the action she can’t screech her voice raw, can’t go until the breath leaves her lungs and the sound is forced to fizzle out, can’t be heard. Mother will not come for her and ask her what was wrong, her siblings won’t whine at her to be quiet.

It’s a realization; mother, brother, sister. She’d had those, hadn’t she?

She looks around, wildly, hopelessly, but she’s far from where they _were,_ before-

She doesn’t quite remember. It’s probably a blessing; it doesn’t feel like one.

She remembers the crush, the weight, the darkness. She just doesn’t quite remember the dying.

The sand beneath her feet feels more real, more solid than before; she looks down and she can’t see through herself, and while she doesn’t quite leave prints in the sand she thinks she could if she really tried.

Maybe the screaming really had done something. Maybe if she’s loud enough, whatever made her into _Esk_ will come and she can demand answers, demand… something. Maybe if she’s loud enough, she can make herself _real_ again.

It wouldn’t work, but. She doesn’t have anything else to do. She’s got an eternity to test it out, to imagine she can taste the words on her tongue and feel them rattle through her ribcage, out through her mind and into the air around them, like heat from the fire, sparks from the sun.

The sky rumbles ominously, echoing her sorrows. She looks up, takes the measure of the clouds; the rain may have let up for now, but it is coming.

The earth trembles beneath her paws. The flood has followed her; she doesn’t think, just moves. Instinct leads her to high ground; when she scrabbles for purchase on the rocks they tumble down the dunes and hills.

She hides in a sheltered patch of grass atop a sandy hill and screams some more because she can. A bird caws overhead in agreement; the sky is grey and the floodwater is grey and the world is a bad place to be, today.

The rainy season brings life back to her parched lands but for her- for her it brought death. Water falls from the sky and her eyes, bitter and salty and scared. She knows what she is, if not what she _was,_ but-

What is she supposed to do now?

The wind howls and the earth shakes, water roars as it bursts from its banks and she screams straight back. Challenge and sorrow as the wheels of life and death grind together and create the clouds above, rejoice and horror below.

She is _E_ __sk_ , _ she is _traveler_ but she- she doesn’t know what this means. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do.

She doesn’t even know her _name-_ what is she to the sky, the ground, the water? What is _esk_ when faced with the great cycles of the Earth itself?

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t even think she _cares,_ at the moment; she’s not brave, she’s not clever or strong or graceful.

But she screams her anger, her challenge to the storms and whatever may control them, anyway. She’s not much, she’s less than and more than she was before and something in between life and death and earth and sky and fire and water. She was alive once, and that counts for something. She’s not _really_ dead now, and that definitely counts for something.

She’s Pele.

And she’ll scream until the whole world knows it.

**Author's Note:**

> READING ON AO3 IS SO MUCH EASIER THE FORMATTING IS SO GOOD...
> 
> Origin Prompt for Pele! Also found on DA (didn't realize I hadn't submitted it to the group, whoops) but it's easier to read here so here it be. I wuv AO3's system so much...
> 
> Lemme know what you think! A quick comment or even kudos makes my day :D


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